CATCHPlus Newsletter 3
June 3rd, 2010

In this newsletter:
CATCHPlus enables wider use of GTAA Thesaurus
Presentation Vocabulary Repository in Heritage Thesauruses Group
June 11: CATCHPlus on CATCH Meeting, Amsterdams Historisch Museum
June 15: CATCHPlus on KVAN days

Collaboration between National Archive and Target Holding BV
For the CATCHPlus subproject Scratch4All, the National Archive is preparing a collaboration with Groningen based company Target Holding BV. This collaboration, in which Target provides a considerable investment in the products that will be developed, is expected to be confirmed officially soon.

In the CATCH project SCRATCH, the department of Artificial Intelligence of the Rijks University Groningen , in cooperation with the National Archive, has shown it possible to Google handwritten material. In CATCHPlus, these results will be made more widely applicable and the software more user friendly.
A web application that allows managers of handwritten documents to upload, edit, annotate, manage and search through those documents and to connect them to other documents, will be built in CATCHPlus. Standard vocabularies and texts will be added for reference.

Target Holding B.V. will develop this web application. Target Holding was founded in 2009, and, as a partner in the Target Project it is responsible for valorisation and exploitation of knowledge that is developed within the project. Target manages the intellectual property (IP) that was developed partly by public parties, and ensures the commercial value of this IP is used maximally.
This experience gives Target a special role in CATCHPlus, bridging the science institution that executed the CATCH project, to the National Archive as owner of the Scratch4All tool.

CATCHPlus enables wider use of GTAA Thesaurus
Techniques developed in CATCHPlus, allowed the Gemeenschappelijke Thesaurus Audiovisuele Archieven (GTAA) Thesaurus, used and managed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, to become available for multiple institutions.

The GTAA was developed in collaboration with EYE (the former Filmmuseum), in order to make audiovisual material as accessible as possible for a wide audience.

The National Archive chose to use the GTAA to describe its photo collection, because of the wide applicability and technical opportunities the system offers. The National Archive can add keywords to the GTAA as well. The management of the thesaurus will remain at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
By using a common thesaurus, findability of objects in different collections is improved greatly. By using Linked Data principles, connections can be made between terms in GTAA and other information resources such as Wikipedia and newspaper databases.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the National Archive started a unique, five year collaboration concerning the use of the GTAA. In the future, other institutions will be able to use the GTAA for their audiovisual collections as well. The GTAA is offered with an Open Database License, a license used worldwide that, under certain conditions, allows use of (part of) the database.

Presentation Vocabulary Repository in Heritage Thesauruses Group
In a semantic web environment, the importance of terminology resources is undisputable. As a first step on the way to practical use of existing resources, DEN held an inventory of terminology resources for cultural heritage in 2006 (see http://www.den.nl/kennis/thema/terminologie).

DEN is considering to take stock of terminology resources again in 2010, to update the existing inventory from 2006. Besides this update, the new inventory will expand its area, which was until now mainly focused on the museum sector, but will include the archive and library sector as well.

In CATCHPlus, we’ve been working on a vocabulary repository. These initiatives seem a good reason to look at the chances to join forces. DEN and the Heritage Thesauruses Group had a meeting on May 21rst. Speakers were Hennie Brugman (CATCHPlus) and Annelies van Nispen (DEN).
View the presentation by Hennie Brugman (in Dutch) here:
WG-erfgoedthesauri-CATCHPlus-HB

June 11th: CATCHPlus on CATCH Meeting, Amsterdams Historisch Museum
In collaboration with the project team of AGORA, the next CATCH Meeting will be organized on Friday, 11 June 2010 in Amsterdam. This meeting starts at 12.00 and is open to any interested party. The location is the Amsterdams Historisch Museum in Amsterdam.

The theme of the day is “Digital Cultural Heritage Goes Social” .
As the Web gets more “social” and as museums, libraries and archives are beginning to offer online access to digital representations of their collections, users and institutions are beginning to inhabit the same, shared information space. This is an exciting prospect, as we are now witnessing new paradigms for engaging users with our shared heritage. The new paradigms imply, in many cases, the need for profound change in institutional practice. For instance, using the power of the Social Web to enrich the knowledge about our shared heritage. During the CATCH day want to put the possible interaction between the Social Web and cultural heritage into the limelight by presentations and discussions on this theme.
CATCHPlus will give a presentation, giving an update of the project so far.

There is no registration fee. Please click here to register.
Contact: CATCH secretariat ; NWO – Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research – Division Physical Sciences
E-mail: catch@nwo.nl

For more information go to the CATCH-site.

15 juni: CATCHPlus op KVAN dagen
The KVAN is the Royal Association of Archives in the Netherlands. The yearly congress (KVAN days) will take place on June 14th and 15th in Kerkrade.

Theme of this congress is “Fundaments in change”.

CATCHPlus wil organize a session on Tuesday June 15th. This session will zoom in on the possibilities the project offers for the archiving sector. Two subprojects will be presented, among which SCRATCH4All by the National Archives and Speech recognition by the Rotterdam Municipal Archive.

For more information on the KVAN days, click here.
To register click here.

To read the newsletter in PDF: CATCHPlus Nieuwsbrief 3